April 17, 2018
The story goes like…
Background
- Between-group riots can increase in response to drought (Almer, Laurent-Lucchetti, and Oechslin 2017).
- (Butler and Gates 2012).
Model
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Data: Social Conflict Analysis Database (SCAD)
Geocoded records of conflict (Salehyan et al. 2012).
Data: Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration (SPEI)
A 0.5 degree spatio-temporal grid of data from 1990-2015 (Vicente-Serrano, Beguería, and López-Moreno 2010).
Prio-Grid
Population and travel time to urban area (Tollefsen, Strand, and Buhaug 2012).
Cropland
Fraction of land as cropland and pasture (Ramankutty et al. 2008).
Property Rights
“Rights to Resources”, 11 questions about the legal framework in a country (World Resources Institute 2014).
Data Summary
| Variable | Mean | Std. Dev. | Min. | Max. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Days with riots | 0.01301 | 0.58386 | 0 | 187 |
| Riot occurred | 0.00072 | 0.0268 | 0 | 1 |
| Riot onset | 0.00069 | 0.02626 | 0 | 1 |
| Number of riots | 0.00079 | 0.03213 | 0 | 13 |
| SPEI | -0.10487 | 0.98712 | -8.01478 | 7.45265 |
| Cropland | 0.08097 | 0.14526 | 0 | 1 |
| Population | 83641.73736 | 214877.62255 | 0 | 8339141 |
Empirical Model
\[\begin{aligned} y_{it} = & \alpha + \beta \; \mbox{SPEI}_{it} + \beta_w \; (\mbox{SPEI} \times W_c) + \beta_m \; (\mbox{SPEI} \times M_c) + \\ & \gamma_{i} + \delta_{t} + \rho_{rm} + \phi_{cy} + \varepsilon_{it} \end{aligned}\]
- \(\mbox{SPEI}\): drought deviation from long-run trend.
- \(W_c\): Whether a country has laws providing for water rights.
- \(M_c\): Whether a country has laws providing for mineral rights.
Results
Discussion
- Unable to reproduce the results of Almer, Laurent-Lucchetti, and Oechslin (2017).
- May help to
References
Almer, Christian, Jérémy Laurent-Lucchetti, and Manuel Oechslin. 2017. “Water Scarcity and Rioting: Disaggregated Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa.” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 86. Elsevier BV:193–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2017.06.002.
Butler, Christopher K, and Scott Gates. 2012. “African Range Wars: Climate, Conflict, and Property Rights.” Journal of Peace Research 49 (1). SAGE Publications:23–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343311426166.
Ramankutty, Navin, Amato T. Evan, Chad Monfreda, and Jonathan A. Foley. 2008. “Farming the Planet: 1. Geographic Distribution of Global Agricultural Lands in the Year 2000.” Global Biogeochemical Cycles 22 (1). American Geophysical Union (AGU):n/a–n/a. https://doi.org/10.1029/2007gb002952.
Salehyan, Idean, Cullen S. Hendrix, Jesse Hamner, Christina Case, Christopher Linebarger, Emily Stull, and Jennifer Williams. 2012. “Social Conflict in Africa: A New Database.” International Interactions 38 (4). Informa UK Limited:503–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2012.697426.
Tollefsen, Andreas Forø, Håvard Strand, and Halvard Buhaug. 2012. “Prio-Grid: A Unified Spatial Data Structure.” Journal of Peace Research 49 (2). SAGE Publications:363–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343311431287.
Vicente-Serrano, Sergio M., Santiago Beguería, and Juan I. López-Moreno. 2010. “A Multiscalar Drought Index Sensitive to Global Warming: The Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index.” Journal of Climate 23 (7). American Meteorological Society:1696–1718. https://doi.org/10.1175/2009jcli2909.1.
World Resources Institute. 2014. “Rights to Resources: The Status of Local Natural Resource Rights in National Laws in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. http://datasets.wri.org/dataset/rights-to-resources-map.